Madagascar's Junta Jailed the Man Who Ordered the Killings. It's Also Arresting the Kids Who Survived Them.

On 2 September a court in Antananarivo sentenced Richard Ravalomanana, Madagascar's former Senate president and a retired general, to ten years of hard labour for complicity in the murder of protesters. It sounds like accountability. It is closer to a receipt: proof that the security forces killed at least 22 people and injured over a hundred more during the Gen Z uprising of September and October 2025, and that exactly one senior official has been made to answer for it a year on.

The uprising itself was not complicated. Young Malagasy took to the streets over power cuts, water shortages, and a president who turned out to hold French citizenship he wasn't legally allowed to keep. The gendarmerie, under Ravalomanana's influence, answered with live fire. Within three weeks the army had defected to the protesters' side, Rajoelina had fled the country, and Colonel Michael Randrianirina was sworn in as head of state promising elections within two years and justice for the dead.

What Madagascar got instead, according to Amnesty International's reporting six months into junta rule, was a regime that kept the old spending priorities, expanded the definition of "threats to national security" to net anyone linked to the former government, and left parliament's own commission on protester deaths sitting unused. The only investigations that moved were the ones convenient to the new boss: the Senate president and a former education minister, both relics of the government the junta replaced. Not a single serving soldier or gendarme who fired on crowds in September 2025 has faced the kind of trial Ravalomanana got.

Meanwhile the junta has been arresting the Gen Z movement's own organizers. ConstitutionNet and Amnesty both documented protesters detained in the months after the very uprising that installed Randrianirina, with his spokesperson waving away questions by citing an imaginary separation of powers in a country now run by a colonel who fired his own cabinet without explanation and installed a former gendarmerie officer in its place. This is the oldest trick in the counter-revolutionary playbook: prosecute the losing faction's enforcer loudly enough that it reads as justice, while quietly criminalizing the people who actually forced the regime change.

None of this is unique to Madagascar. It is what happens whenever a state's security apparatus survives the fall of the government that commanded it — the personnel change, the chain of command doesn't. A single show trial of a cowboy-hatted general lets the junta claim moral high ground while it builds arms deals with Beijing, fossil fuel contracts with Moscow and Abu Dhabi, and discusses hosting Trump's deportees, all decisions the Gen Z movement that put Randrianirina in office was never consulted on. Solidarity here means watching past the verdict: the number that matters isn't the one man sentenced, it's how many protesters are still in cells for demanding the same thing twice.

Sources

BBC: Madagascar ex-Senate chief jailed over deadly Gen Z protest crackdown
Amnesty International: From Gen Z revolt to junta control
ConstitutionNet: Arrests of Gen Z protesters fuel fears
Wikipedia: 2025 Malagasy protests